A small, solid, dark cross tattoo centred on the upper back of a woman with her hair up, photographed from behind with a warm vintage filter.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair tied up is photographed from behind, with her face not visible. A small, solid cross sits centrally on her upper back, between the shoulder blades, in dark ink with simple, even edges. The warm, hazy filter gives the photo a soft, sunlit tone, and the cross is the clear focal point against the bare skin and off-shoulder top.

Back Cross Woman

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mortar went off in the wind before I'd finished pointing the last course, so I spent the afternoon on my knees in the chancel of Harrowgate Keep with a bucket of lime and a trowel that Mr Pell swore had belonged to his grandfather. Nobody had told me the chapel still had a floor. It lay under three feet of nettles and blown sheep dung, and when I raked it clear, I found the cross.

Keep reading

It was cut into a flagstone near the altar step, small and solid, its arms square and its edges even. Whoever chiselled it had not been a carver. It had the plain, patient look of a man working by candlelight with a borrowed tool. Mr Pell said the monks marked their stones so the wall-men would know which were theirs. Mrs Ashdown, who sold tea from a hatch at the gate, said it was where the old lord's daughter knelt each evening, watching the bay for a ship that never came back from Bergen. I told her that was a good story. She told me it was the only true one anyone in the village had.

I didn't want it lost under rubble, so I bedded the stone back down in fresh lime and tamped it with the heel of my boot. By the time I'd finished the window slit had turned amber, and the light lay across the flags like something poured. I sat on the step and thought about how a mark like that outlasts the people who made it, and how it still asks you to kneel, even when there's nobody left to answer.

Next morning the nettles had crept back to the wall, but the new lime was pale and clean around the cross. Someone had left a daisy at its foot, its stalk pressed into the gap. I didn't move it. I set my trowel beside it, the way you rest a hand on a shoulder, and walked down to the village with grit in my knees and nothing else to carry.